In hospitals and other health care environments, it is often necessary or desirable to collect and display a variety of medical data associated with a patient. Such information may include laboratory test results, care unit data, diagnosis and treatment procedures, ventilator information, attending physician or health care provider, and administrative or admission related information associated with a given patient.
Presently, such information is often provided via a chart attached to a patient's bedside or at an attendant's station. However, such physical charts are cumbersome to view, and often do not include the most up-to-date medical information associated with the patient. This problem is exacerbated due to the fact that such medical data arrives from multiple sources and at various times. Furthermore, present charts are not adapted to enable a physician or other care giver to easily access, view, or determine the results of multiple medical tests or other data associated with the patient. In addition, present techniques for navigating through a variety of patients' medical information are both tedious and inefficient, requiring extensive manual review and manipulation of physical chart information, or numerous selections via a user interface screen if information is available in electronic format. Moreover, tracking patients through multiple care units (e.g. from ER to CCU to ICU) presents a formidable problem using present techniques. Consequently, a need exists for a faster, more effective and user friendly means for navigating patient medical data associated with groupings of patients in a network environment including accessing, correlating, tracking and displaying patient medical information derived from a plurality of sources.